Lost Wonders
by rustyliver
Summary: Myka in a warehouse that is just a warehouse. AU


"Why South Dakota?" her mother asks again for the 20890th time.

Myka is tired of explaining to her that there is no actual reason to it. It was a random pick. She had just lost her job and she didn't know what to do. So she closed her eyes and pointed at a map. Her finger landed on the Badlands of South Dakota and that was where she went.

She turns to look at the clock behind her. 13 seconds to 8.34.

"Hey, mom," she says. "I have a customer. I'll talk to you tonight."

She doesn't. But she will in…

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

The entrance bell jingles.

"Good morning, Miss Wells," Myka greets.

The woman comes in every day. Always at the same time. Bringing in one item each day. Sometimes big. Sometimes small. Sometimes packaged. Sometimes not.

She will nod when Myka greets her and go straight to the elevator.

But today, she pauses before she pushes the elevator button.

"Helena," she says.

"Sorry?"

"Call me Helena."

Myka smiles. "Good morning, Helena. I'm Myka."

"I know," Helena says. Then she pushes the elevator button. She looks up to the digital display to see at which level the elevator is. "I am sorry I haven't been a very pleasant customer."

"You're not—"

But the elevator has arrived and Helena goes in without waiting for Myka to finish her thought.

She's not unpleasant. Myka doesn't think so. Myka thinks maybe she is just a little too sad to care about pleasantries. She recognizes the vacant stare Helena has while waiting for the elevator. She used to see it in the mirror. She still sees it sometimes.

...

The next day, Helena goes back to nodding and waiting silently for the elevator.

Myka watches her through the security camera.

She might come into the warehouse like clockwork but the length of time she spends in her unit varies. Sometimes she is in there all day. Sometimes she is in there for five minutes. Myka doesn't know what she does. She pulls the door down every time only leaving a little space for air to come in.

"I bet she'd come on Sundays too if we're open," Pete says. He is early today.

When Myka started working in the warehouse, Pete immediately gives her the task of opening up in the morning.

"No one ever comes in before nine," he told her, "so I always have some snooze time. But this lady started renting a unit six months ago and she comes in every morning at about half past eight. It's seriously messing with my sleep."

Pete likes to fool around. Every time they go into the basement, he would point at things and start making up stories about them, how they have magical properties. There is some weird stuff down there so it's almost believable. It annoys Myka to no end. Especially when she checks the inventory list and finds things like Mata Hari's stockings, Harry Houdini's wallet and Jack the Ripper's lantern on it.

But she never gives him a hard time for his sleeping habits. He always comes into work with bags under his eyes. And he has been sober for two years so she knows he wasn't out partying the night before.

It could have something to do with his time in the military. She's not sure. She has never asked because she doesn't want to answer him when he asks about her past.

"You're early today."

"I had a good night," he says with a big dumb grin on his face.

Then Myka remembers. "It was your big date with Kelly last night."

"Yup."

"So it went well?"

"So well that she spent the night."

Myka raises her hand. She doesn't do high fives but Pete's been trying to get Kelly out on a date for two months now.

Pete slaps her palm.

"Don't mess it up," she tells him.

"Wouldn't even dream of it."

She looks at the security feed again. Helena is locking up her unit.

"How about you and the hot creepy English lady?" Pete asks.

"I don't know what you're talking about." Helena is already at the elevator door.

"Yeah, 'cause you call all the customers by their first names."

"She told me to call her that," Myka says, her eyes trained on the elevator door.

Pete rests his chin on his knuckles. "Oh, Miss Wells," he sighs. Then he turns dramatically. "No. I have noticed how you've been staring at me," he says with an awful English accent. "So please, call me Helena."

"Stop," she punches his shoulder.

"And you can call me Myka," he's back with the puppy dog eyes, "in case you can't read my name tag."

"Shut up," the elevator is at the second floor.

"I can read but I understand why you didn't know that because I'm so mysterious."

"Pete!" she cries out. The elevator door will open any second now.

She tries to cover his mouth but he pushes her shoulder so she ends up grabbing his chin.

Now he's just saying words in his terrible imitation of an English accent.

The elevator dings.

They both freeze.

Helena walks out of the elevator.

Myka is mortified. Then she realizes that Helena isn't even looking at them. She just walks straight towards the entrance.

"Goodbye, Helena!" Myka shouts, waving with her arm that isn't strangling Pete even though she knows that Helena isn't going to turn or even glance at her.

Helena is always sadder when she walks out of the warehouse than when she walks in.

Pete waves too and whispers, "You're so pining for her."

...

Myka had hoped that Helena will talk to her again the next day. She thought Helena was back to the nodding and the silent waiting because Pete was there. But it's the same the next day even though Pete is late as usual.

And it remains that way until Tuesday.

On Tuesday, Myka greets Helena with the customary, "Good morning, Helena."

Helena nods and pushes the elevator button. She doesn't say a word as she waits.

But when she comes back down, she walks towards the reception desk instead of the entrance.

"So tell me," she says. "Why is it called Warehouse 13?"

…

It's a week later when Myka sees her smile for the first time. Myka brings her to the basement and tells her the stories Pete made up for some of the items in there.

She doesn't find the idea ridiculous at all. In fact she starts making up her own stories.

She picks up a worn out katana and says, "This is Honjo Masamune, the legendary lost sword. It is forged so perfectly that its balance and alignment make it possible to cut through even light. Although, its most famous use is when it split Shigenaga's helmet. Very little people knew that it could also make a person invisible due to its ability to split light."

"Wow, you have a penchant for destructive objects," Myka says after she has told her about the Minoan Trident (a ridiculously large fork) and the House of Common Masonry (an ordinary brick).

"How about this?" she picks up a grey plastic key. "H.P. Lovecraft's Silver Key. It makes anyone who touches it will be seen and heard as a tentacle monster like the one described in Lovecraft's book, The Call of Cthulhu."

Myka immediately cringes at the image. "No," she says. "No." She shakes her head. "No."

Helena laughs. And Myka isn't sure if the weird feeling in her stomach is really from her phobia of tentacles.

"Not a big fan of tentacles?" Helena asks.

Myka shakes her head. "I told you nothing destructive!"

"It's quite a fun way surprise someone," Helena says, putting the key back onto the shelf.

"Yeah, then you'll get beaten to death."

"There is no need to be nasty. It's just a little prank."

"You and Pete can be best friends."

"The man with the chin?"

Myka nods.

"You will have to introduce me to him then."

...

"Why do you have all these things?" Helena asks as they explore another aisle for the next 'artifact', as Pete calls it.

"I'm not sure. I guess sometimes people have things they don't want to keep but they don't want to throw away either," Myka says, her fingers sweeping a shelf as she walks alongside it. "We're supposed to only keep them until the owner stops paying but Mrs Frederic has a soft spot for forgotten belongings."

"The warehouse owner?" Helena asks, her eyes scanning the shelves to her left.

Myka nods. "She said, as long as we have the room, we give these items a home."

"What happens if you no longer have room?"

"We try to sell some of the forgotten stuff," Myka answers. She stops at the locket which caught her eye when they first entered this aisle. "If we can't, we throw them away."

Helena stops too. "What do you have in mind?" she asks.

Myka opens the locket. "Myka Bering's locket. It shows the person you miss in any expression you want them to have. How a frown looks on them, a smile or even tears. I know we have cameras nowadays but sometimes we forget to capture certain memories and—"

Helena snatches the locket away from her and shuts it. Then she clenches it in her fist so tightly Myka's afraid that she might hurt herself.

"Helena," Myka calls quietly at first. "Are you okay?" Helena doesn't seem to hear it. "Helena!" Myka calls again, rising her voice slightly.

Helena places the locket back onto the shelf. "I'm sorry," she says avoiding Myka's gaze and leaves the basement in a rush.

...

Helena will never speak to her again. Not after yesterday. She had thought that inventing an artifact based on herself would be charmingly awkward. Or is it awkwardly charming? Well, it doesn't matter. She had failed miserably because of all those things she had said after. She was thinking about how rare Helena's smile is and she wanted to keep it somewhere safe. And the words just slipped out of her before she could stop them.

Myka looks at her watch again. It's almost nine. Helena is late. She starts to worry. What if Helena doesn't come back at all? She hopes that isn't the case. She can stand the silence as long as she can see Helena again.

So she waits. And every time she hears the entrance bell jingle, she stops whatever she is doing and hopes to every god there is that she will see Helena. But it's never her.

And when it's closing time, Myka tells Pete that she'll close up today. Then she tells herself that she's just going to wait for another five minutes.

Half an hour passes by and she's still waiting.

She finally gives up at six minutes after six.

She is packing her stuff when a quiet voice says, "Hi."

She immediately turns around and finds Helena leaning against the reception desk, smiling. Myka is so ecstatic that she doesn't think about how strained the corners of Helena's mouth are.

"I thought you close at five," Helena says.

"We do," Myka tells her.

Helena's smile fades slightly but it looks more relaxed now. More honest.

"Then I better be quick," Helena says picking up the big box at her feet. "If you don't mind that is."

"No, of course not," Myka says, shaking her head. "Take all the time you need."

Again, Myka doesn't think about how Helena doesn't seem to hear a quarter falling off her pocket and onto the floor in the quiet warehouse. And Myka doesn't say anything because she wants to return it to Helena when she comes back down. It will give them something to talk about.

...

In retrospect, she should have noticed that there was something wrong with Helena.

Helena came to the warehouse after closing time when she knew no one was supposed to be around. And maybe Myka knew that something was off. That's why she didn't go out to check that dog carcass in the middle of the road that Helena told her about. Instead, she picked up the quarter and went to the third floor to return it to Helena.

As soon as the elevator door opened, she smelled gasoline. She immediately ran towards Helena's storage unit. The door was partially closed as usual. She pushed it up and what she found was a child's room.

And Helena, standing in the middle of it holding a lighter in her right hand.

...

There is a small bed on the far right covered with yellow and blue. The ceiling was painted with a picture of the constellation. There are posters of cartoons and boy bands she has never heard of on the wall by the bed. Dolls and cars and books and a crooked model of a volcano that lights up at the opening are scattered all over the floor.

They are all wet with gasoline.

"She was always a little stubborn when it comes to tidying up her room," Helena says, her eyes following Myka's gaze across the floor.

"What…what are you doing Helena?" Myka asks.

"This was how she left her room. Can you believe that?"

Myka takes a step forward and as soon as she does that, Helena flips open her lighter.

Myka holds up her hands and backs away immediately.

"She was going to spend the weekend with her father and she didn't even think to tidy up her room." Helena keeps the lid open. "She was so excited because her father was going to take her to a Justin Bieber concert and I suppose she forgot. It made me angry."

"Why?" Myka doesn't know what to say. She's stalling in the hopes that she could find some way to talk Helena out of this crazy thing she's about to do.

"Because I was not the fun parent. I was the one who nagged when she didn't eat her vegetables. I was the one who turned off the TV at night so she would go to bed. I was the one who she shouts 'I hate you' to. Then her father swoops in on every other weekend and they have the times of their lives." She looks down to the floor and the tears that have been pooling in her eyes fall. "My last memory of her is filled with anger."

"That's why you're doing this? You're angry?"

"I'm calm actually. I could see her," Helena says, smiling, "if there is indeed an afterlife. If there isn't, then that's alright too."

"So you won't have to think about her?" Myka asks, slowly taking a step forward. The flame is already lit. If she doesn't do it now, she might turn into a barbecue. "But you don't want to forget. Otherwise, you wouldn't have done all this."

"Stop," Helena says, taking a step back. "I'm going to drop this." She raises her arm.

Myka takes another step forward. This time, she feels bolder. "Then do it. I'm tired of losing people I care about." There is a reason why Helena wanted her out of the warehouse. "This way I know that I'm not going to die alone."

Helena tries to retreat further but her back hits the wall.

"I know how it feels," Myka snatches her hand. The heat of the flame burns her but she doesn't flinch. "You still buy her favorite cereal, don't you? And every morning when you open the kitchen cabinet to take out _your_ cereal, you see hers just sitting there and you always forget so you take it out and pour it into a bowl. You fill up the bowl with milk and halfway through, you remember that she's not going to eat the cereal."

Helena tries to pull her hand away and the lid accidentally closes. But she's still grasping the lighter tightly.

Myka pushes the lid open again with her thumb. She's not sure what she is thinking. She just knows that it's not enough to pry that lighter out of Helena's hand.

"I don't want to forget either but I wish I could stop feeling this way," she tells Helena. "So come on," she lets go off Helena's hand. "Do it."

Helena looks at Myka. Her arm is still raised.

"Do it!" Myka cries out.

There is doubt in Helena's eyes. And Myka thinks maybe she's gotten through to her.

But then Helena screams and in that quick moment when she falls to her knees, Myka isn't sure if she has put out the lighter.

She should run, Myka tells herself but her legs won't move. Not without Helena.

So she opens her eyes, expecting the room to be engulfed in fire.

It isn't.

She breathes a sigh of relief.

But there's Helena on the floor, sobbing.

...

"So what is it like to have a date in a psych ward?" Pete asks as she lifts a portrait of a living room onto a shelf in the art aisle.

Mrs Frederic was so grateful to Myka that when Myka requested for her to not press charges on Helena, she agreed. On the condition that Helena gets some help.

"She's not my girlfriend." She writes down the details of the portrait onto her clipboard. "She can't," she adds as an afterthought. "Not now."

"But you want her to be?"

She gives a meek nod and pushes the trolley to the next aisle.

Pete isn't doing the inventory with her because she is the one who needs a two hour lunch break tomorrow to visit Helena. Artie, the manager told her that she could have it if she does the inventory for the new stuff that came for the basement and Pete would rather not do the inventory if he doesn't have to.

"Why?" Pete asks, walking alongside her.

She's not sure to be honest. She has only seen Helena in her grief.

Then she passes by the locket and remembers the way Helena smiled that day. How her eyes flickered with excitement when naming the artifacts. How that made Myka's stomach flip in ways she thought were no longer possible. And along with that, she felt a joy she thought she had long forgotten.

And she knows, behind that grief, there is something more to Helena. Something worth finding out.

Helena said something to her that day and she had looked at Myka as she said it. Myka thought it was a random thing to say at the time. But she thinks she gets it now.

She echoes the words to Pete.

"Maybe even in a world without endless wonder, there is still wonder to be found."


End file.
